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50$ 3D bonding coming ??; Intel announces "...we are ready"
October 29, 2007
Burlingame CA was the site for the 4th annual RTI conference “3-D Architectures for Semiconductor Integration and Packaging”. 225+ of the worlds experts gathered to compare notes and hear the latest on 3D integration technology and business projections.
Conference Director Matt Mecray and technical chairs Wilfried Bair, Suss, and Sitaram Arkalgud, SEMATECH, put together an excellent collection of speakers to cover a wide range of 3D topics.
In the pre-conference symposium I spent 2 hours covering 3D definitions and technology options, Bob Patti, CEO of Tezzaron Semiconductor, reviewed 3D requirements and tradeoffs and Lisa McIllrath, President of R3Logic spent the remainder of the session instructing on how to design 3D circuits. Some interesting figures from Bob Patti – (1) most Tezzaron memory designs use ~ 10K vertical interconnects (TSV) / mm sq.; (2) Bob expects wafer bonding to cost ~ 50$ per wafer pair by 2010. Bob claims Tezzaron is getting 1 micron alignment accuracy (3 sigma) on 8 inch wafers today. Recall Tezzaron earlier in the year announced a production agreement with Chartered Semi in Singapore.
The biggest announcement of the conference was from Jerry Bautista of Intel. His talk concerned the well published memory latency issue when building multicore processors. He informed the audience that stacking the DRAM under the CPU does heat up the DRAM a little, but that this is not a major thermal issue. In this configuration power must be routed through the memory to get to the processor and Jerry indicated that ~ 1A / mm sq is needed to operate the CPU.
Of more interest to the entire conference was Jerry’s comment that there were no remaining technical issues and that Intel was ready to commercialize their 3D integration technology as soon as the product groups decided which product to insert the technology into. He felt the most likely candidates would be workstations and/or HPC’s.
…….more information from the RTI 3D conference is coming up soon, so stay linked to “Perspectives from the Leading Edge”
Posted by Philip Garrou on October 29, 2007 | Comments (1)
